
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 12, 1994                   TAG: 9404130014
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

6 MILLION

AT TEMPLE Emanuel on Sunday, nearly 100 people gathered to recite the names of victims of the Holocaust. The ceremony is part of a worldwide effort to read the name of every one of the 6 million Jews whom the Nazis killed. In the Roanoke area, as elsewhere, a week of remembrance activities is under way. A survivor's daughter will speak at a local church Thursday.

Why the need to recall? The need, in fact, is more urgent than ever. As Rabbi Jerome Fox of Beth Israel Synagogue in Roanoke pointed out: "The surviving generation is dying out. The eyewitnesses won't be here much longer."

To this generation falls the duty of keeping memory alive for future generations.

Meantime comes a letter to the editor of this newspaper, from one Karl Sense of Galax. He refers to a March 27 news story, headlined, "Synagogue arson shocks Germans."

Was Sense shocked, too? Perhaps not.

He writes that the "most interesting part" of the news story was a reference to about half a million Jews living in Germany in 1933. Says Sense: "It is highly unlikely that from 1933 on more Jews entered Germany. On the contrary, many Jews left Germany after 1933. One must therefore conclude that the Jews' claim that 6 million Jews were exterminated in a 'holocaust' is a falsehood."

Which is nonsense, of course. No historians suggest that 6 million German Jews died. Most of the victims were natives of other countries.

One wonders, though, whether facts and logic - the kinds of reasonable arguments that convince historians - could ever persuade Karl Sense to believe the Holocaust is not a falsehood.

He seems to want to deny - or at least to diminish - the event's enormity. He seems to need to put the Holocaust inside sneering, skeptical quotation marks. Why?

Sense is not uncommon. Time magazine recently recounted a survey indicating that almost one-fourth of Americans question the facts about the Holocaust. Why?

A whole revisionist movement has apparently sprung up in America and elsewhere, speakers and writers and pamphleteers disputing that the Holocaust ever happened. Why?

The answers to these questions, whatever they may be, could help explain why Roanokers and others have been reciting the names of Holocaust victims. Evil did not die with the end of World War II. To remember is to survive.

by CNB